In our more and more mobile and highly dynamic driven world as well as with the increasing tendency of the IT main stream to move towards cloud computing, the service orientation aspect increasingly becomes a core subject. Especially within the cloud context, almost everything is identified as X-As-A-Service, thus giving services more than a simple restricted technical meaning.
Under these circumstances, the term “service” covers a wide spectrum of usage and real world behavior that almost all the established service descriptions are unable to fit to. The available languages focus just on either pure technical attributes such as WSDL or WADL for web services or on sensitive characteristics such as WSML for ontological models. Useful and efficient frameworks for service discovery in this rapidly expanding environment have not been explored.
In order to meet in particular the nonfunctional requirements of service specifications, the inventors observe that what is needed is a corresponding description instrument. Until now there is only USDL, with the essential capability and commitment qualified to fill in this nontechnical gap through giving an adequate real world model for services, the way they are envisaged to work.